Freelance Police

Developer: LucasArts
Designer: Michael Stemmle
Composers: Mark Griskey
Voices: Bill Farmer (Sam) and Nick Jameson (Max)
Engine: Proprietary
Platforms: Windows
Release: Cancelled
Control: Keyboard and mouse

Blurb

Spring 2004 marks the return of interactive entertainment’s most freakishly adored dog and bunny tag team, as LucasArts unleashes Sam & Max Freelance Police onto an unsuspecting Windows PC game buying public. The long-rumored follow up to the critically acclaimed adventure classic Sam & Max Hit the Road plunges Sam & Max into a whimsical miasma of fur-flying action, hare-pulling puzzles, and unnerving cross-species jocularity.

Details

Freelance Police was a sequel to the original Sam & Max game, Hit the Road, announced at E3 2003 and cancelled in March 2004. The game was to be a 3D point-and-click adventure and the project was lead by Mike Stemmle. Little is actually known about the plot of the game, but Stemmle stated that it contained “six stories, loosely held together by a thrilling über-plot” and that Flint Paper would play a “critical” role. Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson, the original voice actors for Sam & Max, had reprised their role for their game.

The individual stories are wide-ranging cases of the Freelance Police, featuring exotic locales (such as a low-rent space station, and a lame-ass neopagan desert bacchanal) and freakish bad guys (like an exceptionally honked-off Miss Congeniality, and a rogue artificial intelligence made out of tortilla chips). There’ll be more mini-games than you can shake a genetically altered lab rat at! And that’s a good thing, because one of our dozen or so mini-games actually revolves around the shaking of genetically altered lab rats. In space. In 3D.

- Mike Stemmle, 2004, CVG interview

LucasArts claimed the cancellation was due to economic and market conditions, and many of the staff who were working on Freelance Police moved to Telltale Games. Creator Steve Purcell called the move to cancel the game “mystifying” and a “shortsighted decision”. When the license for Sam & Max expired for LucasArts, Purcell gave it to Telltale in 2005 to create their episodic series of games with which they have been doing ever since.